At Racialicious, Matt Egan has a very smart analysis of the history of representations of Jewishness in American film and television — both by Jewish producers/directors/writers and by others. In particular, I found his analysis of the Judd Apatow/Jason Segal oeuvre interesting: Egan sees Peter‘s choice between Sarah and Rachel in Forgetting Sarah Marshall as a choice between denying his own Jewish ethnicity or embracing it. He plumbs the hidden Jewishness of “Friends” and “X-Files.” And Egan has harsh words for recent Holocaust films The Reader and Valkyrie, which he describes as “decenter[ing] Jews to rehabilitate mass murderers.”
On the same topic, here is my take on another recent Holocaust movie, Defiance.
—Dana Goldstein
